As corporations have increased the numbers of their employees working mostly off-site, i.e., out of the office, the concept of “hot desks” has become common. Using hot desks, instead of each employee having their own individually assigned desks, employees are assigned an empty desk when they come into their office. Using the assigned desk, the employee can connect their laptop and have use of a desk phone. The problem arises that the desk telephone has a telephone number associated with it that is not assigned to the specific person who is now using the desk. The employee has to transmit this telephone number to people with whom they may need to communicate. It is inconvenient to reconfigure the telecommunication switching equipment to provide a new number for the employee each time they sit at a particular desk since the reconfiguring is a manual operation. Further, the reconfiguration must be manually undone once the employee is no longer using the desk.
Within the prior art, one solution to the above problem is to have specially equipped telephone sets that accept credit cards which define the user to the telephone switching system. The disadvantage of this technique is the need for specially developed telephone sets.
In addition, certain telecommunication switching systems such as MultiVantage® telecommunication switching system from Avaya, Inc. provide features that allow a telephone set to have its telephone number modified by a user through the use of a feature access code, a secret code and extension number. The phone can be tailored to the needs of the user. Unfortunately, this prior art solution does require a number of manual operations on the part of the user. In addition, the user must remember to reset the extension number when the user is done using the desk.
Another prior art solution that has been used by some corporations is to give employees only wireless telephones, which they can then carry to any desk within the office complex. The wireless telephone is always used by the same user; hence, it always has the correct telephone number.